Internal Hard Drive is not visible in Finder or Desktop or anywhere

The problem first and then the details.
I cannot see my systems hard drive, No icon shows up on the desktop, and it is not visible in the Finder.
It does however show up in Disk Utility.
I have repaired permissions and repaired the disk, both from within the OS and also from the install disc during a reboot.
Not here are some details. This is both a fresh install of the OS AND a brand new drive. I just had it installed today and then reinstalled the OS.
While going thru the process of reinstalling all my software, something froze for no good reason, and I eventually had to force quit the finder and when the system wouldn't shut down, I had to physically power it off.
Upon rebooting, my systems HD is no longer visible.
I suppose I can try and reinstall again, but I feel like there has to be a smarter way to deal with this.
Any suggestions?

Have you confirmed that in Finder > Finder menu > Preferences > General and Sidebar tabs that the boxes to show hard disks are checked?
Assuming they are checked, you may a victim of the 'invisible drive' problem. See Francine's helpful tutorial for the fix:
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/invisible.html

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    Message was edited by: Clifton Little (typo)

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